“That doesn’t mean that I am going to change the same tone I have been using for 30 years. What the hell is the difference? If you guys can’t separate tone from substance, that is your problem not mine. Stop being such whiners about tone.” –MGL

Tag Archives: dave cameron

Yesterday, Brandon Warne took a trip down memory lane, reminiscing on his favorite deaths in baseball history. He couldn’t quite remember them all. But the commenters at FanGraphs were helpful, as always.

OMG JUST KEEP FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT, DAVE. YOU MEAN SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH TO ME EVEN THOUGH I HAVE NEVER MET YOU BEFORE. YOU’RE PROBABLY THE MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSON IN MY LIFE AND I WILL NEVER FORGET YOU. WORDS CANNOT BEGIN TO DESCRIBE MY FEELINGS FOR YOU. AFTER EVERYTHING YOU’VE DONE FOR ME AND MY FAMILY, INTRODUCING US TO WAR AND UZR, I FEEL LIKE I’D BE LOSING MY FATHER OR MY BROTHER. PLEASE DONT DIE ON ME CHIEF, I CAN’T HANDLE IT. I MIGHT HAVE TO OFF MYSELF JUST TO BE WITH YOU.

HOW DO I LIVE WITHOUT YOU
I WANT TO KNOW
HOW DO I BREATHE WITHOUT YOU
IF YOU EVER GO
HOW DO I EVER, EVER SURVIVE
HOW DO I
HOW DO I
OH, HOW DO I LIVE

Hope you get better. Though this article sucks. Considering statistics will have a meaningful impact on whether you die or not, probably you should choose another anecdote to talk about how statistics are useless. (I’m sure since you don’t use statistics you won’t write a will either. Or make any preparations in case of death. The same as if you were a healthy man in your mid-20s.)

Either way. I look forward to mocking your complete lack of knowledge of personal finance for years to come.

And I thought I was the douchebag of Fangraphs. What the hell is wrong with you people?

I must say that I love FanGraphs’ comment rating system. Other sites with an up/down voting system use those votes to determine whether to show or hide a comment and sometimes the order of the thread, too. Even Baseball Prospectus, with a website stuck in 2001 does this. But FanGraphs just displays a big red number next to poorly-rated comments and does nothing else with them. Which is great for me. If I’m skimming through a lengthy thread, I make sure to stop and read all the red ones.

I am sick and tired of FanGraphs. Their player pages remain the gold standard, both in information and usability. But it’s their “stories” that really bother me. What happened to actual analysis or discussing interesting baseball issues? Questioning the conventional wisdom? Nowadays, the author picks a player, spends 15 minutes looking at his player page, decides whether to highlight his xFIP, BABIP, LD%, or HR/FB, and spends another 10 minutes writing up why Player X is underpeforming/overperforming because his Stat Y is so far from the league/his career average.

Unless it’s Dave Allen or Albert Lyu, in which case the author spends a couple of hours writing an R script to perform a local regression of swings, home runs, or ground balls by plate location. Having done that, he picks a player, spends 10 seconds updating his script with the right player IDs, runs it, takes 2 minutes uploading his graphs to WordPress, and 5 minutes explaining what’s in said graphs. It’s important to avoid giving anything that could be construed as an opinion in this last step.

As “FagGraphs” said succintly in a comment on another post here, “You might as well have just posted a link to his player page.”

(I won’t ape the Pozterisk, but to play devil’s advocate, it’s nice to know that sabermetrics has grown to the point where someone can now earn a good amount just by mailing it in with some vaguely-sabermetric articles. Mainstream acceptance, here we come!)

As for the writers who break the mold, in Remington’s case, it doesn’t matter in the end since his articles were–as always–super boring and on the intellectual level of a middle schooler. Cistulli’s writing often crosses the Kahrl Line, but he has his fans (graphs! I hate myself). And everyone knows that Dave Cameron is the rock of the FanGraphs blog.

The decline of FanGraphs may be overshadowed in intensity by the decline of the Hardball Times or in longevity by the decline of Baseball Prospectus, but it was a site that held promise to be everything a SABR could hope for and didn’t strive to appeal to idiotic mainstream fans. That the blog is now nearly indistinguishable from TMI activates the weeping circuit in my robot motherboard. If the FanGraphs overlords could manage to fire a few (or all) of the other contributors, SABR everywhere would have reason to smile.

Attention, Daves: for $10 a post, I’ll rip all the SABR out there a new one. Hell, it’s got to be better than Jack Moore finding the world’s stupidest correlation.